Although they are on opposite sides of the globe, thousands of miles from each other, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) based out of Queens, New York and Bangladesh Islami Chhatri Sangstha (BICS) based in Dhaka, Bangladesh sport an identical logo. Why? Maybe it’s because the groups are part of the same organization, sharing the same hateful ideologies, and possessing the same extremist underpinnings. The proof comes from the groups themselves.

In 1941, the Muslim Brotherhood, the fanatic religious/political movement that began in Egypt over a decade earlier, reached the shores of South Asia. Under the name Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), individuals throughout Pakistan and, later, its surrounding areas embraced the organization’s belligerent philosophies.

One of these areas was Bangladesh.

Bangladesh Islami Chhatri Sangstha or BICS is a JI female student group, which was established at Dhaka University (DU) in 1978. This location and time period is curious, as just seven years prior, a series of massacres took place in Bangladesh, then-East Pakistan, to which DU was a main target and of which JI was a key offender.

Beginning in February, throughout the majority of 1971, upwards of 3,000,000 Bengalis – mostly unarmed – were systematically slaughtered at the hands of the Pakistani army in collaboration with Islamist groups. Marked for death were Hindus and Muslims said to be tainted by “Un-Islamic influences.” Men were set on fire, women were raped, and children were stabbed mercilessly with bayonets. The perpetrators included the military wing of JI, Al-Badr, then-led by Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojahid, who is currently the Secretary General of JI Bangladesh and who was recently summoned to appear before a Dhaka court to face charges of war crimes.

At the end of the war, following Bangladeshi liberation, the diary of another Al-Badr operative, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, was recovered from his residence. It contained a list of names and addresses of several prominent Bengalis targeted as victims in the war, including a number of DU professors. Khan is accused of leading a death squad and personally shooting and murdering at least seven of the DU faculty, whose names were found in his book. During the war, hundreds of DU’s students were slain as well.

While the members of BICS might not have been responsible for the murders, the supremacist and exclusionary attitude which gave context to the atrocities is very much the same within the organization. On the BICS website, the following statements are read:

·“Its [BICS] aim is to establish in among the female students the superiority of Islam, the ideology suitable for human nature.”

·“Only Islam can develop human beings as wellwishers of humanity and decent in the true sense.”

·“We also believe that there can be no alternative to Islam… It is also our bounden duty to save our sisters from the onslaught of jahiliah, blind imitation of other civilizations…”

Another group, located roughly 8000 miles from BICS, the Islamic Circle of North America or ICNA, exhibits these same bigoted tendencies. The following are statements made on ICNA’s Why Islam (WI) site in 2009:

·“The article [concerning ‘gay history lessons’] is an eye [sic] opening for those who keep on sending their children to state schools to be mis-educated and de-educated by the non-Muslim monolingual teachers. Bilingual Muslim children need state funded Muslim schools with bilingual Muslim teachers as role models during their developmental periods. There is no place for a non-Muslim child or a teacher in a Muslim school.”

·“You guys [Jews] have been cursed, and G-d’s anger is over you… Who will win? This is really not difficult to figure out… When faced with persecution by the Nazis, did the Jews rise up to fight their oppressors? No, they ran away to Palestine from Europe. The moral of this story is that when the going gets tough, the Jews pack their bags and leave.”

·“First of all, muslims do not believe in the G-d of the corrupted Bible, but we do believe in Allah… Anyone who says ‘la ilahe ilallah’ (there is not god but Him)… is guaranteed with eternal life in heaven… Abt penalty, there is no penalty to be done for our sins. This is [sic] wat u christians made up!!”

ICNA was created as JI’s American affiliate in 1971, the same year as the Bangladesh massacres. Indeed, accused Al-Badr death squad leader, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, whose Al-Hera Islamic Institute is located less than two miles from ICNA in the Jamaica section of Queens, is a former National Vice President and Secretary General of ICNA.

ICNA’s current Secretary General, Muhammad Naeem Baig, contends that ICNA is free from any foreign ties. He stated, in July of 2007 at ICNA’s 32nd Annual Convention, “Islamic Circle of North America is a U.S. based Islamic organization. We have no relations – no links – to any organization or any country outside the United States.” It was, of course, a lie, as has been proven by this author on a number of occasions.

And a brand new proof has been discovered to end all debate on the matter.

When looking at the websites of ICNA and BICS, a striking similarity is immediately noticed – both organizations use the same exact logo, a flower head-shaped icon with the word “Allah” inscribed inside of it in Arabic. The logo has been found on the homepage of ICNA’s National website since at least 1998, and it is all over the website and materials of BICS.

In reality, the Islamic Circle of North America is a South Asian extremist group operating from American shores. While ICNA and BICS are located in different parts of the world, they are part of the same sinister organization, propagating the same hate, striving to wreak the same havoc and cause the same harm to humanity.

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